Restartng the twins

I cowrote a book once. The story of Keld (hello Sparks if you ever find this), a rollocking yarn in a fantasy world, with lots of stories weaving in and out of each other. And I think it's time to retell some of them again now. The man that I love unconditionally has finished his novel, and is needing less support by the day (see haikus), so it's time that I came good on my promise and wrote one myself. And since this is cyberspace, and I live here at the moment, I'm going to do i here. So lets begin. With some of the back story from the other book.

Sometimes we wake up, look around and wonder what we've done with our lives (I did this this week; first tears, then paralysis, and now writing. I'm hoping sanity is next on that list). Sometimes the next thought is what did someone else do with it. And sometimes too there's a wierd disconnect, as though we've stopped living altogether and are merely existing whilst our doppelgangers are awake and alive. One of the threads in Keld is the story of what happens when two very different twins both end up in the right environment for the other one. Throughout history there have been people reported as being able to read the thoughts of others; the StarTrek empaths are only a small thread in a long line stretching back through centuries of seers and saints and ladies in black fringed shawls. And maybe there's some truth in that; a knowing of another person without verbal communications and beyond the clues signalled out by the body. And I wondered if, somehow, two very different neighbouring kingdoms could evolve, one with the seer gene dominant and the other with it absent or dormant; a giant ghettoisation into those who could mind-read and second-guess, and those who mistrusted them.
I had a lovely time evolving social systems and rules for both of these societies; for example, it must be difficult to be a close personal assassin when even thinking a bit too hard will warn off your potential victim. But people are people, despite their talents, and they will always find a way.

And the two societies have grown. Without telepathy, the Pearl Kingdom has skipped the industrial age and gone straight to powerplants that look nuclear, but without a real understanding of their physics. The telepaths in Duin are still in an older, more feudal age, but are well-protected with the ability to concentrate and phase the minds of anyone who tries individually to attack them. Which hasn't happened yet, because the two countries maintain a discreet courtly dialogue: neighbours must have, possibly covertly, some form of diplomatic relations, even if it's to chuck a brick over the wall occasionally or to actively ignore each other across a border (see Cyprus). Sometimes the sons and daughters of power are brought along on a state visit in the hope that they will learn something, and sometimes what they learn is that they really quite like the younger members of the opposition. And then all hell breaks loose. Heck, let's just tell the story...

haiku day

Haikus on the death of an affair.

Yin to my Yang, you are
Contentment. Enough, for
Now it is Spring.

Yin to my Yang. You are
Contentment Enough. For
Now it is Spring.

Yin to my Yang. You are
Contentment Enough For
Now. It is Spring.

Text

Words sting and comfort. Unguarded presence, his text to my yearning in a moments sigh. Am I unloved or is now? Can I comfort the then of him in my tomorrow, or is there no tomorrow? I taste love, pain, desire and turn again to read.

I'm tired; haven't slept properly for days. But I want to capture this feeling, to remember it when it's gone away. I ache. I really almost physically ache. It comes and gos, and at its ebb I just want the pain to go away, and in the floes I forget that its there, and smile and laugh and listen and try to help other people to take away their own pain. But I hold it, because for now, until I let it all go away, the pain contains hope. And there is nothing more exquisite, more beautiful, than the hope of love. And now I've put my pain onto the page and the sensible part of me returns to tell me that I'm a soppy git who ought to be watching my cooking. It's like... it's like the water coming into a harbour that's slowly silting up and becoming land: the transient waves on top of the waves of tides on top of the slow movement to there being no tides there anymore, just the flat calm of drying mud, the first sprinklings of growing seeds and the first birds drifting singing above them, claiming new territory with their songs.

the Grief Cycle

I always have so much to learn about life. I've been watching someone precious go through parts of the Kubler-Ross grief cycle. Which I thought I understood: y'know, denial, anger, negotiation, depression, acceptance, ta-da and some forward rolls to end. But it's more complex than that.

The notes in changing minds describe an 8-stage process, not the 5-stage one I thought I knew. And it has a lovely (clickable) graph of this, which I've unceremoniously copied onto here. So, the 8 stages are (I've pegged these to an event, but it could be a state of being, e.g. illness instead):
* Stability: the status quo before the event
* Shock: immediate, apparent disbelief that the event has happened; emotional paralysis often with no outward reaction, twinned with classic physical shock symptoms
* Denial: longer-term evasion, pretending the event hasn't happened, regardless of evidence.
* Anger: the big explosion (or more usually the series of explosions) about the event or even vaguely-related events or circumstances, often with blame (of self, others etc), sometimes with classic grief
* Bargaining: trying (through actions etc) to make the event or its consequences go away... false hope, if you will.
* Depression: accepting the event has happened, but not having the resources (yet) to deal with it. Often desperate loneliness twinned with refusal to be helped.
* Testing: first tentative steps towards resolving responses to the event; trying small parts of possible solutions and accepting that they might help.
* Acceptance: knowing and accepting that the event has happened, and moving on from it.

Changing minds is good in that its pages contain notes not only on the cycle, but also on how to support people going through the cycle. The cycle itself is a construct to help understand the processes of grief. Everyone goes through it differently, but the stages are broadly right; some people go through some of them very quickly, others slowly; some people get stuck in cycles (e.g. anger-denial-anger); others get stuck at single stages (e.g. anger), but mostly, 99% of the time, the stages above are how it happens.

Other useful posts on the grief cycle include businessballs. The post on gettingpastyourpast is a real cracker on relationship breakdown, in language we can probably all associate with.

Degas' Dancers

Posted from JFK airport, autumn 2007.

I've seen a lot of art this vacation (big hint: if you want to see modern art in NY, go direct to the Met or the small galleries; the other museums just aren't worth it), and the more I see, the more I imagine the stories that go with it. I know there are in fact real stories, and already there are made-up stories (the girl with a pearl earring for instance), but it is so tempting to add just one, to go with Matisse's dancers (in the Met; 2nd floor, modern art section).

George was getting thoroughly fed up. He had Ann holding his left hand, which was normal, them being married, and Mary holding his right, which was also normal but unusual behaviour in front of Ann. Ann's hand was clasped firmly above his; a possessive hand, pulling him around across the dance. Mary; now, Mary's hand was warm and soft, promising later tendernesses with the subtle shifts as he led her round, her light step leaping to his. And Fred; well, Fred was his normal self; comforting and jolly and unbothered with his status as person added to make the circle large enough to paint properly. Fred could be pretty dumb; a big labrador of a man, all happiness and no brains, but always pleased to see you, sometimes so much so that he knocked over the furniture and drooled on the carpet. George retracted that thought immediately; it wasn't so much that he couldn't imagine Fred drooling, more that the thought of Mary's husband spilling bodily fluids, and especially spilling them anywhere near Mary both disgusted and spurned him, although he couldn't resist staring at the corner of Fred's mouth (open slightly with the sheer concentration of the dance) just to check.

No drool. George wondered how the painter was getting on. They'd all been switching this way and that on-and-off for hours now, letting the great man (Mary's friend, of course) catch the right angles and feel for the right shadows. Or shades. Or shapes. Or something anyway; George knew nothing about art apart from: it was a good way to interest women, and all artists were randy bastards who really ought to be contained when they weren't doing their other essential job of livening up parties (noticably never thrown by themselves) and making everyone else feel more sensible. They were probably due a break soon. George had noticed during the dance that the painter only really used yellow at the start of the dance, and switched to other colours pretty quickly. This fact was only really important if you had seen the painting, even for the second before the painter distracted you away and talked about flowers. Fred's chair (blue) was there; the garden (not yellow), the sky.

George wondered about the painter and Fred. The large yellow streak to the left of the painting had more than a hint of Fred the labrador. And then the chair. Fred had sat chatting to the painter; lounging in that added-gravity way that large men do on vacation, as though the effort of staying upright for so many months had to be balanced by an equal effort of stillness once sat down. But why, once gravity had been overcome, had the painter left the chair? It wasn't a photograph, there was no effort in calling a maid to move it: why the chair? One-two-hop; one-two-hop; George started to feel a little better about the possibilities of Fred. Perhaps, just perhaps there was something more here; maybe a reason to talk long and deep into the night with Mary; possibly an excuse to console her tearful nights with a manly shoulder (as he would gently explain to Ann before shouldering that terrible duty). George moved his right fingers a little, flexing them gently against Mary's wrist. She responded in kind, and he gave a little hop, a spring of joy. The painter picked up his yellow brush.

Found poem

I found this on my PC, dated 10th September 2007. Thought I'd leave it here for posterity.

Us, a we, unity. Together.
Apart alone, a lone one twice apart.
From held arms round a willing neck.
Twisted lust, straight love.
Dark black hearts, bright red souls.
Burning up, deep black hot, pyrometric.
Beyond sanity, beyond life,
beyond the boundaries of right, wrong, now, then.
Til reality brings us back apart.
Again the wait. Again the pain of no pain yet.
Again the sharp tenderness of you not you, me not me.
Again the sweet smell of melting rubber sex.
and the soft warmth of trust.
Yours, ours, our own, my own.
The first drops of a life's ocean.
The first swirls of fumbling mixture, from black to white to infinite greys.
I am yours; you are mine. We will learn what that means.

More found words

Dated 6am, 3rd August 1994

Chapter 1

It’s a fact of life that there have always been nameless wars, with heroes forgotten by all except their enemies and a select band of controllers and comrades, hidden from the disapproval of the masses they protect. Each has, each is, a story. Stories come in many forms: some, condensed lives, miniatures with beginnings and ends. Some stories are just continuations, chapters in larger novels, each leading neatly onto the next. Such are these lives.

Rain slithered across her face, snaking its way to stop gingerly at her clothes, the touch of an inexpert lover. She felt the darkness around her, not seeing anything but the lights of the grey stone cottage, not hearing anything but the hum of wet pylons and the ticking of her watch counting away his life second by insistent second. She felt her head swim with the fear, felt the familiar aura take hold, fought against the weakness as she willed, pushed herself towards the cottage and away from the dark taking hold of her, creeping into her soul.

All my life, I’ve been waiting for something to happen. All my life, there’s been a pattern in the background, the subtle electricity of a storm yet to break. I try to break away from the pattern, but whatever I do is part of it, woven into my self as surely as if my destiny had created me. Here, now, as I sit is part of that destiny. Here, as I write, I can feel the threads of my present weave into the spiders’ web of my future, and sat at the centre of that web lies my controller, pulling a thread here, lengthening another there, creating me to its own perfection. There are three constants in my life: an overwhelming sadness, the controller and the trains that I pass through life on, each journey measuring part of my own. At least now I know why I am sad. I cannot explain the trains.
Sometimes in life, you meet someone so heart-wrenchingly special, so wonderful that you’d exchange your own life just to be with them. Sometimes two people feel that way together. And then the trouble starts.
It’s human nature to feel incomplete. It drives us: the all-compelling need to find a part of ourselves that is hidden, that is not quite there but always, tantalising, on the tip of our conciousness- a word, no, the mere sound of a word to describe all that we are not, giving us the self we desire if only we could remember its name. Perhaps that’s why opposites attract - because we have a better chance of finding that missing gene, that missing link: call it what you will, but it’s there, that nagging sense of loss, of the drifting, shapeless part of our being. It is as though we need only one more mental lens to make us see clearly; to understand; to be our own Renoir, Einstein, Da vinci and self at once. But woe betide us when we find that last syllable in our nameless name, because then alone we are dead, for that is the point when need, form and the relentless desire for love become only self and the nullness of truth. We need to have lost that part, need to know our own incomplete humanity, for without this we may join the suburban accountants and collectors of taxes, the dead souls waiting at East Croyden at 7am, for we should have no more passion, no love, no hate - only the tedium of eternal perfection or the mindlessness of ignorance. Pity those who have found their missing self, for their path can only be downwards, and their bliss only temporary. But do not pity me, for I have lost, and can still remember the joy of being whole with the passion of grief, and the conviction of a truth half-known.
At first glance, we were opposites: the extrovert politician, the quiet writer. The mothers’ son, and the girl with no roots, save the temporary stays put out at each new temporary port, each temporary life. Perhaps that was the attraction. But sometimes God in his infinite humour creates doppelganger souls, and sprinkles each with its own little facets, each with its own hidden flaws. There’s a nice theory to expain creation: you can create two identical particles out of nothing, but only for a very short time before they find each other again and remember together that they’re supposed to be a void- but if you lose one of them in that brief period of existence, if by some quirk fate forgets to pair them off again, then reality can’t catch up and you’ve got something big, in fact something universe-sized on your hands. Those occasional special people who are let loose on the world tend to be cancelled out quickly in case fate gets embarrassed, or go mad trying to understand, so I suppose it’s amazing we lasted as long as we did. I blame the trains: British Rail can even make the grim reaper late. It made me too late to save you.

Not that I’ve stopped taking trains: I’m writing this from yet another carriage in yet another landscape. There’s something about travelling up the East Coast that makes you think it’s all a big British Rail joke, that you’re cruising round in a huge circle, past the same wood and the same flat fields (run-down barns optional) and the same bloody great big power station until the music stops and all the trains have to find themselves a station. That’s why some of their super-efficient trains still break down - they can’t admit they’re the odd-train-out, and they’re sulking until the next game of musical stations starts (and Waterloo station plays music in the mornings just to keep the trains running). Aha! a Tesco’s: could this be a stop? No- it’s the same flat redbrick town we passed twenty minutes ago- I recognise the churches. Da-dur-te-ta, Da-dur-te-ta, and the train music goes on, and my search for you across the rail-routes of my world continues.

Medaeval knights had chargers, the Spanish ships, Hannibal was different and used elephants - I have my trains. My quest? To find that part of myself that once had your name, your form, your life, and now does not, except as a memory here, a cutting there. I need to understand you, to understand you by being, to become that part of me that was you, to become you, to risk my own soul if that is what I must do to find you. And I desire- oh, how I desire and love and hate. Loss is measured by what you have loved, and I have lost a world- yours and mine both. Hate is measured by the revenge you are prepared to take, and my hate for the man who took you is equal only to my love. Always just one more train ride, one more piece of you, one more contact, and he too shall die the long slow death that I have these past two years, these long, lonely years. And so it goes on.

Monday
Clean cat-tray
Tidy kitchen
Pay window-cleaner
Meet I.

Warts have very deep roots: deep into the skin, tracing the history of where a blemish came from, forcing the surface to return to being a wart, whatever is done to it alone. Trace the roots and you understand the wart, give or take the odd freckle. Of course, some people call them beauty-spots. Meet I. Another piece of the puzzle. Another piece of your past. Another step closer to you. Child of your father, father of our unborn children, it is not natural that life should be this way. Your father would...but you can explain to him yourself, you’re together now. Just don’t tell him he knows nothing about inheritance - it’s too late for that now.

Train game number 1: reverse blinking. Close your eyes then blink them open 1 2 3 4 5 6 blink: a little red chapel tower, complete with bell 1 2 3 4 5 6 blink: a lilac bush breaking up the green 1 2 3 4 5 6 my god! a station! A real station, with real railings and real clocks: the music must have stopped!

Chapter 2
This story begins a long time before you and I, but I begin with you and I, so that’s where I should start. Another train, another destination, another lifetime ago. A pair of green eyes, green with the ageless knowledge of Jade, sparkling with the cold of Arctic snow. I close my eyes and see them now, not as then, but with the warmth of love, and the colour of summer’s turquoise sea.